Cultural Geography Research Articles

Singapore’s Little Vietnam as a heterosexual quarter within the hierarchical ordering of space

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to look at the social and cultural geography of Joo Chiat Road, aka Little Vietnam, in postcolonial Singapore and assess its effectiveness as a subaltern cultural space. In one way, it is low in the hierarchical ordering of space, as a long cross street between two popular shopping areas at each end. Joo Chiat Road might be perceived as an urban village, with its upper-middle-class residential streets on either side suffering a disconnect with the large number of Vietnamese hostess pubs and cafes on the road itself. It may be seen as a “heterosexual quarter,” but of a type where the lifestyle proclivities of the hostess pub participants are seen as marking them out as a strange and deviant “species,” which must be kept behind closed doors. In the case of the hostesses, they are also marked out as different on the grounds of race/ethnicity.

Cultural geography meets architectural typology: a mixed-methods study of traditional Bayu dwellings in Southwestern China

ABSTRACT Traditional Bayu dwellings in China’s mountainous regions embody a rich yet underexplored architectural heritage, characterized by unique cultural and regional attributes. This study addresses the gap by investigating the architectural typologies, spatial distribution, and cultural influences of these dwellings. Employing a mixed-methods approach within the framework of cultural geography, the research integrates qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Data collection was conducted in three phases: (1) field surveys and documentation of 67 heritage-listed dwellings and 164 traditional villages; (2) collection of geographic data using GIS tools, including Digital Elevation Model (DEM) analysis; and (3) comprehensive literature review of historical and cultural records. Data analysis utilized statistical methods, including second-order cluster analysis, and spatial analysis with ArcGIS. The findings identify four primary dwelling types and delineate four architectural cultural zones shaped by geographical segregation, economic exchanges, and ethnic interactions. This study contributes to a broader understanding of the architectural culture and regional characteristics of the Bayu region, offering valuable insights for cultural heritage preservation and informing sustainable development strategies.

Dancing in the archive: Bodily encounters, memory, and more‐than‐representational participatory historical geographies

AbstractThis paper explores the potential of participatory methods and practices to address the methodological difficulties surrounding the historical geographies of dance, and moving bodies, within archival research. Dance has long challenged traditional notions of the ‘archive’. While non‐representational cultural geographers have privileged dance's ability to generate affect and embodied expression, historical geographers have predominantly struggled to engage with moving bodies through traditionally ‘disembodied’ archives. Ephemeral and embodied, dance escapes conventional historical documentation; this methodological challenge demands a more creative, participatory, and more‐than‐representational approach to historical geography and its privileging of the ‘archive’. Focusing on tap dance and its circum‐Atlantic performance, this paper will explore how bodily encounters with and within the archive can lead to new research questions, through contemporary embodied participation in creative practices. By combining participatory approaches with more‐than‐representational historical geographies, it is possible to reconcile the history and politics of dancing bodies with corporeal and affective dimensions of the past. This dual approach demands working with creative communities as a researcher, in the past and the present, to draw out previously marginalised voices. This paper discusses three specific methods: oral histories and records of lived experiences; approaching the ‘body’ as an archive; and fostering public historical geographies, including walking tours, memorials, and festival participation. The paper finally considers how these participatory approaches work to build memory, community, and place‐making through shared heritage.

Sedimentary relations: cultures of access and the matter of shallow seabed coring

Contemporary cultural geographies have increasingly addressed subterranean and deep spaces through questions of access to earthly materials and the politics of resource extraction. This article engages with these themes through an investigation into the ‘doings’ or practices of seabed access. It does so by following the embodied and material experiences of two human geographers, an artist, a scientific coordinator and a microbiologist, who together undertook a day trip to learn shallow sediment coring in the Wadden Sea mudflats of Northern Germany. Stemming from a research project concerned with the accessibility of the seabed in international waters (how society can access its ‘common heritage’), we examine how taking samples from even the most accessible type of seabed – a shallow coastal mudflat within national waters that is not covered by seawater during low tide – presents a myriad of considerations, challenges and complications. We argue these are vital in examining the cultures of access – the embodied and material limits that define and shape participation in environments in which you and I have rights. These considerations, challenges and complications ranged from physical strength and balance requirements to an understanding of tidal movements, access to simple but specific equipment, appropriate clothing and private transport. We use ethnographic reflections and our photographic engagements to consider sedimentary relations: how we can and do relate to the seabed.

Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate by Thomas Aiello (review)

Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration: The Cultural Geography of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate by Thomas Aiello (review)

Guadiana in Four Movements

This paper introduces Guadiana in Four Movements, a research-short film that explores the present and future of the River Guadiana’s Lower basin in the Iberian Peninsula. Through a multidisciplinary approach combining social science and the arts, the film integrates diverse audio and visual materials from multimodal ethnographic fieldwork with the sonification of climate scenarios. By drawing connections that demonstrate the tensions between diverse formations and temporalities and by accounting for how these tensions are shaping, and taking shape along, the Lower Guadiana, it tests the boundaries and potential of geographic theory, revealing how creative practice can engage with complex socio-material and socio-natural assemblages. This essay underscores the significance of interdisciplinary collaboration in advancing cultural geography and provides alternative ways to understand and engage with Guadiana’s landscapes and possible futures.

Mail art methods and the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease

ABSTRACT Building on geographic scholarship around disability and drawing on a programme of arts-based research, we bring attention to the social and cultural geographies of families affected by rare disease. Seeking creative methodological opportunities, we invited families to send us postcards as a means of sharing experiences and reflections. We contextualize the emergence of the postcard as a modality of communication, situating our work within a wider epistolary and artistic tradition, before examining the opportunities postcarding might produce for geographic and broader qualitative research, noting the forms conduciveness to multimodality and recent calls for more engagement with the medium. We detail our own practices of participatory postcarding and the questions, challenges, and hopes such raised. Analysing the postcards received, we discuss how such helps understand the shifting social and cultural geographies of rare disease, reflecting on themes of (in)accessibility and exclusion, changing domestic geographies, and the importance of, and challenges associated with, family-based identities and communities in the context of rare disease. Such highlights opportunities for disability geography to engage in cross-cutting conversations and agenda-building with the nascent area of family geographies, along with further geographic inquiry into the spaces and worlds of rare disease.

A Gothic Heterotopia: Four Anglophone Responses to Venice

Starting from the view of the cultural geographer, Doreen Massey, that it is necessary to ‘move beyond a view of place as bounded, as in various ways a site of authenticity, as singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity’, this article argues that places change in time, because the physical environment changes, especially in the Age of the Anthropocene, and because they are the product of imaginatively conceived collective fictions. It takes the view that outsiders invariably construct heterotopian visions of places, often drawing on past imaginaries and that Venice has habitually been cognitively perceived through Gothic lenses, in which past, present and future intermingle. It pursues this line of thinking in relation to four Anglophone representations of Venice: the recent film A Haunting in Venice (2023), directed by Kenneth Branagh and scripted by Michael Green, which is very loosely adapted from Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party (1969), and which subjects the whodunnit genre to a Gothic makeover, Daphne du Maurier’s short story ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971) and Nicolas Roeg’s film adaptation (1973) of it, in which the Gothic particularly manifests itself in the form of psychic precognition, and Amitav Ghosh’s novel Gun Island (2019), in which an ostensibly realistic novel is infiltrated by recurrent paranormal elements, several of which are occasioned by the ‘unnaturalness’ of climate change

Home in Han Suyin’s 'Till Morning Comes' from the Perspective of New Cultural Geography

Viewed through the lens of new cultural geography, a geographical landscape is a symbolic system showing the beliefs and values of society, as in the case of the home landscape. The article employs Mike Crang’s concepts of landscape and home to examine different homes in Han Suyin’s Till Morning Comes (1982). From leaving homes, searching for homes to returning homes, Stephanie, an American woman in diaspora, is exposed to different cultures, experiencing a sense of home in China, a sense of homelessness in both China and America, and a sense of being between worlds. In the process of searching for a home, Stephanie constructs her identity as a Chinese and eventually as a world citizen. The home in the novel is more than just a dwelling place; it is a place signifying cultural identity and a meaningful space that influences the identity transformation of a diasporic woman. The article therefore uses a textual analysis approach to explore how homes are represented and how a diasporic woman’s identity is affected by the home landscape she experiences in Till Morning Comes. This novel’s exploration of home illuminates the unique experience of a diasporic woman, highlighting the importance of re-evaluating Han’s work within the framework of contemporary cultural geography.

The New Zealand Honorary Geographic Board at work, 1924–1946

AbstractAfter briefly positioning cultural geography work on place names in New Zealand, this article examines the origins, composition and activities of the Honorary Geographic Board (1924–1946) as a place naming authority, with particular attention paid to some of the key individuals involved.

Activating smell’s political potential through smellwalk route design

This text unravels the collaborative design approach we—Ph.D. researcher Lauryn Mannigel, science and technology studies scholar Christy Spackman, cultural geographer Kevin McHugh, and visual artist and Studio Arts instructor Vicky Sabourin—used to create the route of a guided smellwalk for Montréal’s Quartier Concordia, exploring the political potential of smell. Drawing from the perspectives of practicing artists who value smell’s ephemerality, contextuality, and materiality, this text outlines the development of the smellwalk route, where we tested Mannigel’s conceptual curiosity in designing a path around the Henry F. Hall building—a building with a contentious political past—and Sabourin’s familiarity with the smells of frequently encountered spaces at Quartier Concordia. By exploring the roles of geographical proximity and distance, spatial familiarity and unfamiliarity, and the recollection of smell experiences—creatively balancing preconceived ideas with chance and pragmatics—our creative process develops a practice-led framework for olfactory encounters and public discussions that may activate the political potential of smell.

The Apotheosis of Mountains: Sacred Space, Symbolic Landscape, and National Consciousness in Ch’oe Namsŏn’s T’aebaek Poetry

Abstract Ch’oe Namsŏn was a key figure in the introduction of geography into the print media culture of early twentieth-century Chosŏn. Ch’oe used geography as a tool, creating a new territorial consciousness for national cohesion, and this article explores how this greatly shaped his poetic landscape. Locating itself between the boundaries of literary studies and cultural geography, this work looks at Ch’oe’s underexplored T’aebaek poetry, in which his interests in geography, history, and national identity significantly converge. Drawing on “Mount Taebaek” of Korea’s past, Ch’oe fashions the mountain into a pseudo-religious icon of nationhood. A symbolic landscape, evocative of a uniquely Korean past yet rising as a global icon going into a modern world, Ch’oe’s poetry creates a godlike figure for the Korean people to look to in a changing time of imperialism, nationalism, and modern progress. Through various iterations of T’aebaek—benevolent deity, bringer of modernity, omnipotent ruler of the world—one sees the mountain play a vital role in the shaping of Ch’oe’s nationalist project, which would have continued influence on his writings later in life.

What Returns, What Remains

Abstract: In February 2020, a group of Kanaka 'Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawai'i in the late nineteenth century. This essay explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically fourteen iwi po'o (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Ko'olau mountain range of O'ahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, I draw upon theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Through the Native Hawaiian concept of ho'opahulu, which, in 'ōlelo Hawai'i (Hawaiian language), encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from overfarming, this essay highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, I argue against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geographies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state.

Affective authoritarianism as joyful ‘oeuvre?’ Godly Subjects and Suburban Gladiators

This paper presents the spatial experience of authoritarianism as a dynamic atmosphere with the seductive potential for radical joy. For Lefebvre (1996), joyful co-creation of space – an ‘oeuvre’ – was a vital facet of everyday urban life. As such, the paper challenges normative portrayals of authoritarianism as an inherently joyless, bleak and oppressive operation of power, and delves deeper into its variegated, contextually contingent and complex P/political spatialisations, conflicts and contradictions. Affect emerges as a productive lens through which to explore the complexities, range of emotions, identities and world-makings of authoritarian space, and its paradoxical capacity for joy. The paper draws from ethnographic reflections and spatial vignettes from three comparative experiences in different parts of the world: a mega-church service in suburban Singapore, and visits to two suburban hardcore gyms (in Northern England and Southeastern United States). These experiences are thematically framed as spaces of ‘Godly Subjects’ and ‘Gladiators’. They are spiritual, exhilarating spaces; spaces of radical possibilities. They are also inherently hierarchal, patriarchal, disciplined and oppressive. Thus, conjunctural subjectivities are affectively embodied in these spaces resulting in conflictual experiences. Though joyful, these are spaces of ‘cruel optimism’, where desire and aspiration are caught in a loop of un-achievability. Such is the contradictory nature of authoritarian power/space. However, whilst critical, the paper avoids an easy taxonomy of authoritarianism into clear binaries, framing it as both an open and closed socio-cultural-political space, and highlighting how and why more affective and spatialised readings of authoritarianism are needed across contextual cultural geographies at this moment.

The comfortable endurance of sustainable practices: values, affect and community dynamics in Catalan eco-communities

This article examines how discomforts shape the endurance of practices in two Catalan eco-communities. Despite the common perception of sustainable practices as uncomfortable, scant empirical attention has hitherto been paid to how residents in alternative spaces cope with discomfort-inducing practices. While cultural geographies have typically emphasised the co-adaptation of bodies and environments as necessary to ensure the comfortable endurance of practices, this article introduces three additional elements in the context of eco-communities: values, repetition and community dynamics. It demonstrates this by first examining how residents initially navigated the winter cold, demonstrating the efficacy of bodily adaptations and guiding values. Second, considering more slowly emerging discomforts, this article foregrounds the impact of a practice’s repeated performance on ever-changing bodies, that oftentimes led to their abandonment. Finally, it emphasises the impact of community dynamics, revealing that tendencies to abandon more ‘radical’ practices were always contested. By underscoring the interplay between values, embodied affects and community dynamics over time, this article contributes to geographies of comfort by showcasing the generativity of eco-communities as valuable spaces for theorisations of dis/comfort and the endurance of practices.

ATLASES: REASONS FOR THEIR CREATION AND FIRST CONCEPTS

Atlas cartography of the 21st century is losing its “flagship” status in cartography. Paper atlases have become less attractive in the age of information society. At the same time, electronic atlases either lose competition to other cartographic applications or dissolve among them without having their unique features. Searching for ideas and meanings for new EA concepts, we explored the first atlases’ history to understand their essence, reasons for creation, and success factors. The article, based on contemporary works by historians of cartography and cultural geographers, clarifies the answers to the following questions: 1) What is the origin of the word “atlas”? Who was the first to use this word to describe a “collection of maps”? 2) Which atlas should be considered the first, particularly the first in the modern sense? Who originated with the idea of the first atlas? 3) What was the atlas “Theatrum Orbis Terrarum” concept by A. Ortelius? 4) What was the concept of G. Mercator’s “Atlas sive Cosmographicæ Meditationes De Fabrica Mundi Et Fabricati Figura”?

SAD geographies: Making light matter

This paper addresses the relationship between light and mental health through a multifaceted inquiry into the complex and contested condition of ‘Seasonal Affective Disorder’ (SAD). It does so by first charting a disciplinary neglect of seasonal depression in ‘geographies of mental health’, followed by a consideration of broader philosophical ideas about human sensibilities and the place of light in life. These interpretative resources are brought into correspondence with both clinical debates about the legitimacy of SAD as a phenomenon and the role of culture in the experience of light-affected sadness. The paper culminates by outlining a future research agenda for a cultural geography of SAD in the context of climate-changed environmental light.

Conversations in geography: Journeying through four decades of history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom

This article offers a critical appraisal of institutionalised knowledge production and exchange on the history and philosophy of geography in the United Kingdom. We examine broad epistemic trends over 41 years (1981–2021) through an analysis of annual conference sessions and special events convened by the History and Philosophy of Geography Research Group (HPGRG) of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers (RGS-IBG). We show how organisational, sociocultural, and epistemic changes were coproduced, as expressed by three significant findings. Organisationally, the group emerged through shared philosophical interests of two early career geographers at Queen's University of Belfast in 1981 and received new impetus through its strategic plan 1995–1997, which inspired long-term research collaborations. Socioculturally, the group's activities contributed to national traditions of geographical thought and praxis in masculinist academic environments, with instances of internationalisation, increasing feminisation, and organisational cooperation. Epistemically, the group's events in the 1980s shaped contextualist, constructivist, and critical approaches, and coproduced new cultural geography, but the emphasis shifted from historically sensitive biographical, institutional, and geopolitical studies of geographical knowledges, via critical, postcolonial, and feminist geographies of knowledge-making practices in the 1990s, to more-than-human and more-than-representational geographies in the early twenty-first century.

Content and Method of Studying Minority Traditional Villages and Dwellings Based on Cultural Geography

It is of great significance to strengthen the research on minority traditional villages and dwellings for maintaining ethnic multicultural ecology and promoting the revitalization of rural culture. In ethnic minority villages and houses the urgency of the research and protection, this paper discusses the cultural geography for the applicability of the ethnic minority villages and residential research, from the cultural ecology, cultural diffusion, regionalization and integration, culture and landscape, space and place, the respect such as comprehensive mechanism illustrates the traditional residence in ethnic minority villages and cultural geography research content and the advantage. This paper probes into the methods of cultural geography to reveal the characteristic cultural connotation of minority traditional villages, which lays a foundation for deepening disciplinary research and protecting minority villages. Taking Yao nationality as an example, this paper puts forward the framework of minority villages and dwellings research, aiming to further promote the breadth and depth of minority villages and dwellings research.

CULINARY GEOGRAPHY SCIENTIFIC DIRECTION NEW WORLD OF TOURISM

The article considers the importance of culinary geography in the training of specialists in the specialty 242 Tourism and recreation. Obtaining a higher education in the specified specialty in our country is directly relating ding to the activities of the departments that ensure the graduation of specialists - tourism experts for the needs of the country. The study of issues, problems and the nearest prospects of obtaining a professional higher education in tourism and recreation in Ukraine were intensifying by the authors' research due to the appearance of publications approximately since 2015. The analysis of curricula shows the introduction of culinary geography and the justification of the tourism education model at the departments of the Faculty of Geography of Ivan Franko Lviv National University, Yuri Fedkovich Chernivtsi National University, Volodymyr Hnatyuk Ternopil National Pedagogical University and other universities. As a resulting of the conducted research, new aspects of culinary geography were established. In recent years, interest in the "geography of nutrition" has grown rapidly. Reflecting the great popularity and public interest in all aspects of nutrition - from health issues, global hunger and malnutrition to climate change environmental destruction and animal welfare. The availability of a significant number of journal articles and books on various aspects of food geography creates prerequisites for teaching this subject in universities and colleges. The popularization of scientific research on the geography of food allows activating interest in the development and improvement of one's "geographic ideas" about food. Dishes and methods of their preparation are specific features of the national characteristics of each nation. Culinary geography is a systematic, multidisciplinary, integrated approach to the study of folk food as an important element of material culture. Folk food is an important element of material culture. Its composition and quality characteristics depend on many factors. These are primarily historical, socio-economic, cultural and household, geographical living conditions of the ethnic group, traditions, directions and degree of development of agriculture. Dishes and methods of their preparation are specific features of the national characteristics of each nation. A broad understanding of the study of everyday life, traditions of the material and spiritual culture of peoples, their origin (ethnogenesis) is engage ding in by a number of sciences that have their own unique research methods. In a narrow sense, culinary geography is a component of cultural geography. The geography of culture examines culture in geographic space, studies the spatial differentiation and diversity of its elements, their expression in the landscape and the connection with the geographic environment, as well as the reflection of geographic space in the culture itself. Thus, the arguments listed above for establishing the scientific direction of culinary geography allow us to outline its main definitions. First, we note that there is no single interpretation of the name of the scientific direction (academic discipline) of the problem of culinary geography. It is necessary to state that two main approaches have historically developed in the literature: 1) Food geography (quite a wide range of subjects); 2) Culinary tourism, culinary geography, nutrition in tourism, gastronomic tourism. Keywords: culinary geography, geography of food, culinary tourism, geography of tourist food.